Jack Maple, cop who created NYPD data measurements, honored with street name

New York City police officers stand near a street sign that renamed 108th Street Jack Maple Place during a ceremony in the Richmond Hill section of Queens on Monday, Sept. 21, 2015. Photo Credit: Charles Eckert

From watching over the gherkins, Maple rose with his single-minded determination to become a transit cop. Eventually, hitching his wagon to the rising star of his friend William Bratton, Maple became a deputy commissioner of the NYPD and in 1994 took a single computer and created the Compstat system of crime reporting, which sparked the modern transformation of the NYPD.

Monday, under a brilliant sun, the very intersection of 108th Street and Park Lane South that Maple crossed for that deli job was named Jack Maple Place in a ceremony presided over by NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and attended by former Mayor David Dinkins, local politicians, police brass, judges and people from the neighborhood. The street sign was unveiled to music from the bagpipes of the NYPD ceremonial unit.

"In some respects, Jack gave his life for the city . . . because he spent his life focused on saving it and we should all remember that with Compstat we saved NYC," Bratton told the crowd, referring to the revolutionary way Compstat revolutionized policing with timely data collection.